Articles

I like to think of Desperate Literature as a transitional space between street and home. Co-owners Terry Craven and Charlotte Delattre see this space as completely fluid. “There’s little distinction between our private life and public life. It’s how we live and what we live for,” Charlotte says. “A very nice version of how we live.”

Lauren Brazeal’s first full-length collection, Gutter (YesYes Books, 2018), tells the story of a young woman, who identifies herself early in the collection as “Little Mohawked Squatter Punk,” living on the streets of Los Angeles. This collection challenges all my expectations about storytelling in poetry. The narrative emerges from a strange combination of forms, everything from sestina and villanelle to letters, instructions, erasure, checklists, and more.

Most of us know the feeling of coming undone, of drifting through a sea of loneliness unanchored, unmoored. After a few cities, relationships, peregrinations, we struggle to find someone who knows our name, let alone remembers it, who can speak to us in a way that feels vaguely familiar, who knows us in a way we all desire to be known.